'I suppose we deserted, aye. But we were the heroes’

An Irishman who deserted the Irish army in order to fight the Nazis has
recently been pardoned by the Irish government

John Stout (pictured with his wife Doreen) who served with the Irish Guards and was at D-Day and involved in the liberation of Belsen. After the war he was ostracised for being Irish and having served with the British ArmyPhoto: JULIAN SIMMONDS

John Stout fought like a hero, but when he came home from the Second World War old friends refused to speak to him. Strangers shouted abuse on the streets of his native Cork. Men like him were branded “deserters” by the Irish government, shunned by most employers and banned from working for the state. They were also barred from claiming the dole, under a decree known as the Starvation Order. And all because they had chosen to leave the resolutely neutral Irish army and join the fight against the Nazis.

It is only now, after seven decades, that Ireland has finally forgiven him and his kind, with an official apology for the “shameful” way they were treated. Their long campaign for justice came to an end last month, when the Irish president, Michael D Higgins, signed an amnesty removing the threat of prosecution from all 4,981 of the so-called deserters. And earlier this month poppy wreaths carrying the three colours of the Irish flag were laid in their memory in Dublin and places around the world where they fell in action.

The pardon almost came too late. Only half a dozen remain alive, and of those only John Stout is able to be interviewed. Now 89, he still has vivid memories of his time in the British Army. And he also remembers what banished any doubts he had about leaving the Irish army to join the war effort: the horrors he saw in April 1945 when his unit helped liberate the death camp at Bergen-Belsen, where corpses were piled in their thousands and survivors were like the living dead. “Oh, Jesus. They were skeletons. They had no minds, after all they had suffered. They were like zombies. I thought to myself then, 'This is a cause worth fighting for.’ ”

That wasn’t the way some people saw it back home. Neutrality was seen as a way for the fledgling state to survive and assert itself, but while help was given to the Allies on the quiet, some people bent the other way. People like president Éamon de Valera, who went to the German embassy in Dublin when Hitler died in 1945, to sign a book of condolences. And it was de Valera’s government that dismissed all of the so-called deserters from the Irish Defence Forces, stripping them of all pay and pension rights. Their names appeared on a blacklist circulated to town halls, stations and anywhere else they might look for state-paid work.

This was not a court martial or any kind of military tribunal, but a political decision with no right of reply. “They were completely disowned,” says Peter Mulvany, a retired Dublin bus driver and law graduate who led the campaign to clear their names.

The stigma remained long after the official orders were amended in 1949, and some families suffered for decades. Now, though, attitudes have changed in a dramatic way. The amnesty means they are no longer seen as deserters in the eyes of the law, a source of comfort to the families of those who did not live to see it.

Ireland’s defence minister, Alan ­Shatter, said: “When they returned at the end of the war, they were treated shamefully by the state, despite their bravery.” The minister has linked the so-called deserters with the 60,000 or so other Irish citizens who fought against the Nazis, saying: “For too long we failed to acknowledge their courage and their sacrifice, and for too long their contribution was airbrushed out of official Irish history.”

He has talked of these idealists going absent without leave to fight for a higher cause. In many cases that is true, but real life is not as simple as politics. John Stout says the truth is, he was no idealist.

“My father died when I was four, and that left my mother with nothing,” he says, speaking at his home on the outskirts of Cork. “There were six of us children and I was 15. So I took off my short pants and put on long pants and went up to the barracks in Cork to sign up with the Irish army.”

His duties involved cycling along the coast looking for signs of invasion. But there was rebellion in the barracks, because the soldiers were not being fed properly. “The quartermaster was flogging off our rations. We were very hungry.”

That was the real reason he and half a dozen mates took their leave and caught a train to Belfast in 1943, dressed in civilian clothes. “There was a pot of stew boiling inside, at the back of the recruiting office in Clifton Street, we could smell it. The big sergeant saw the looks on our faces. Says he, 'Are you hungry, lads?’ We says, 'Oh, we are.’ So he brought out big bowls of stew. He knew we were deserters.”

Before long they were heading for Normandy. Mr Stout recalls approaching the beaches on D-Day to wade ashore as Irish Guardsmen. “There was one fella there on the boat crying, holding on to the side, refusing to go. This Irish fella who was crying, he was only small. The sergeant shouted at him. 'You ******, we fed you, we gave you money, now get off the boat for us.’” The soldier’s nerve had gone.

Mr Stout survived the beach and made it to Caen, where he became a company runner under Capt Desmond Kingsford, who had rowed for Great Britain in the 1936 Olympics. “He heard me talk and he says, 'You’re Irish. You stay with me.’ ”

The combat group defied machine-gun and anti-tank fire to seize an important crossroads near St-Charles-de-Percy on August 3 1944, for which Kingsford was awarded the Military Cross. Not that Mr Stout knew about the medal. “Ah, well,” he says, when I tell him, “He didn’t win it without me, did he?”

This white-haired old soldier can’t walk without a stick and when he talks you have to listen carefully, but his eyes light up when he talks about the war. Near his armchair is a picture of the captain, who died a week after his heroics.

“Captain Kingsford says to me, 'John, you take that trench and I’ll take this one.’ About four o’clock in the morning, the time when the Germans always came at us with Stukas, I says to myself, 'He’s very long getting us rounded up.’ I hopped up off the trench to find him and he was dead. A shell had hit the one tree in the field and it was down across his chest,” he says. “He chose the wrong trench. I think about that man a lot.”

Mr Stout went on to fight at Nijmegen and in the Battle of the Bulge. “I was infantry, but when we were moving fast we hopped up on the back of the tanks. There was a lot of fighting. My prayers got me through.”

Did he ever regret joining up? “I remember well thinking one Sunday, 'What the hell am I doing here? They’re all at home going into the boozer.’ ”

The thought did not last long. “I loved the war,” he says, unapologetically. “I was young, I wanted adventure. I was a born soldier, if you like. I was mad for action.” He makes a whooshing sound and mimes shells flying past his head. “I wouldn’t take no notice of it.”

Some people back home would have hated him for fighting with the British, wouldn’t they? “They would, I suppose, but I never spent much time with them.”

In April 1945, his unit was among the first to enter Bergen-Belsen and met with a vision of hell. There were 13,000 corpses lying unburied and tens of thousands of survivors, many infected with typhus. “The officer said, 'Don’t touch them, but give them what you have. There will be people coming along behind us to help them.’ There were bodies piled up here and there and everywhere.”

Like many others, John Stout struggled to cope without orders when he left the British Army in 1949. “I had no plan. I went on the beer at first, drinking every day.”

He stayed away from Ireland initially, but others went back and suffered. When he did return in 1952, there was no work for him. “There was nothing attached to my life here. It was gone.” People were hostile to his face. “They’d say, 'Why don’t you go back to John Bull?’ Or some old crack like that. Worse.” His old friends shunned him.

Was it not fair to call him a deserter? “I suppose we deserted, aye. But not in my heart. I did my duty. I twist it around now. I say the fellas that stayed behind were cowards. We were the heroes. We wanted to fight. We didn’t want to stay behind, bumming food here.”

He was forced back to England, and settled to a steady job laying pipes on the south coast, where he and his wife Doreen spent 20 years, raising a family. The Stouts returned to Cork as pensioners two decades ago and found it a happier place for them at last – although he kept quiet about his part in the war.

And finally, with the amnesty and poppy wreaths laid at the war memorial in Dublin, his own country has recognised that he and his fellow “deserters” fought and died for a just cause.

John Stout is glad of that. “I did my duty,” he says. “I’d do it again if I had my way back. I know it was the right thing to do.”